The New Hacker's Dictionary

This term is quite old, going back at least to the mid-70s in jargon and probably much earlier. The word 'automagic' occurred in advertising (for a shirt-ironing gadget) as far back as the late 1940s.

avatar // n. syn.

[in Hindu mythology, the incarnation of a god]

1. Among people working on virtual reality and cyberspace interfaces, an avatar is an icon or representation of a user in a shared virtual reality. The term is sometimes used on MUDs.

2. [CMU, Tektronix] root, superuser. There are quite a few Unix machines on which the name of the superuser account is 'avatar' rather than 'root'. This quirk was originated by a CMU hacker who found the terms 'root' and 'superuser' unimaginative, and thought 'avatar' might better impress people with the responsibility they were accepting.

awk /awk/

1. n. [Unix techspeak] An interpreted language for massaging text data developed by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan (the name derives from their initials). It is characterized by C-like syntax, a declaration-free approach to variable typing and declarations, associative arrays, and field-oriented text processing. See also Perl.

2. n. Editing term for an expression awkward to manipulate through normal regexp facilities (for example, one containing a newline).

3. vt. To process data using awk(1).